Science Quote by Liberty Hyde Bailey

A scientist admitting he "do[es] not yet know" is a quiet act of rebellion against the modern expectation that expertise should sound like certainty. Liberty Hyde Bailey, one of America’s foundational horticultural voices, isn’t confessing ignorance so much as defending wonder as a legitimate tool of inquiry. He’s writing from a moment when botany was racing toward classification, institutional authority, and the hard sheen of laboratory confidence. Against that backdrop, his language tilts deliberately toward the lyrical: plants "creep", "roll", "float" - verbs that give vegetation agency and motion, turning passive specimens into almost animal presences.

The subtext is methodological. Bailey is staking out an epistemology where not-knowing is productive: mystery isn’t a failure of science but its ignition. "Entranced" and "absorbed" read like a manifesto for sustained attention, the kind required to notice "variety and kinds" without reducing them to a list. He wants the reader to feel that taxonomy is not conquest; it’s courtship.

Then comes the most potent turn: "Everywhere they are visible yet everywhere occult". Bailey compresses the central paradox of the natural world into a single line: abundance does not equal comprehension. Plants surround us so completely they become background, and that familiarity becomes its own camouflage. The quote works because it turns the ordinary - weeds, stream moss, seaweed - into a reminder that the everyday still contains the unknowable, even in an age that prizes explanation.